


Radiance

by greygerbil



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, No Banquet/No Video AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-03
Updated: 2019-01-26
Packaged: 2019-03-26 14:20:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13859532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greygerbil/pseuds/greygerbil
Summary: After his fifth Grand Prix gold, Victor is adrift, unmotivated and unsure how to continue his career and his life. While he ponders this question at the rink at night, he finds himself sharing the ice with Georgi, who has just gone through his latest break-up. An uneasy understanding turns into something deeper as they decide to work together for the first time.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a No Banquet/No Video AU, so Victor isn't really aware of Yuuri.

Georgi pressed the switch and watched the cold neon light flood the dome of the practice rink. It looked giant when deserted and Georgi felt deaf for a moment. During the day, the place would be teeming with people – juniors, seniors, ice dancers, pairs, singles, all practicing their routines, stretching as they stood on the walkway around the rink, jogging on the spot to warm up or just loitering until their coaches shooed them onto the ice. Rows of water bottles, piles of trek jackets, costume pieces and towels would cover the benches. You could hear the thudding of jumps and whizzing of blades on the ice, people chatting, music leaking out of cheap ear buds. The street would be busy with traffic and passersby, seen through the windows that lined the walls of the Sports Champions Club. Georgi moved carefully as his every step echoed through the hall now, his only company behind the glass outside the ghost-glow of headlights and the occasional late-night wandering shadow hurrying by.

Georgi had grown up on rinks full of pro competitors, so their barely controlled chaos was well-known to him. The pain of the break-up from Anya had made him people-shy for the moment, though; and at the same time, he didn’t feel like spending any time alone at home, facing the memories of her still clinging to every inch of his apartment. He went to his regular practice with Yakov, but the key for the back door of the Sports Champions Club his coach had given a few select students came in handy now to avoid the crowd whenever possible.

Not that he was in any danger of meeting Anya during the day, rarely as she trained here, anyway, but the circumstances for that did not lift his mood, either. She was off to Venice with her new boyfriend until the end of April and Georgi’s instagram feed was flooded with their pictures, since he hadn’t been able to bring himself to unsubscribe from her account yet. Staring at her beaming into the camera with another man, gleefully happy in a way Georgi was sure she’d never looked with him, was like having a nail driven into his heart with each new photo.

All he could think to do was distract himself. At the rink, he would skate until his muscles burned or jump until his knees gave out. Pushing his body to the edge of what his stamina would give without trying to turn the elements into a performance that would dredge up emotions was a good way not to get too far into his own head. Still, sometimes the desperation and anger and sadness spilled into a step sequence, a short dance, for what was ice skating in the end but an expression of feelings? As long as he was alone in the evenings, no one noticed him crying, at least.

His nightly solitude at the rink ended eventually. As the door leading to the changing rooms opened on the final Saturday of March, Georgi expected someone from the cleaning staff. Instead, he was facing Victor wearing an old Olympia t-shirt and tight pants frayed at the hem. He had returned from a press stint in Moscow after finishing the season with two golds gathered at the Grand Prix and Worlds and Georgi had greeted him this morning at practice, so he’d known Victor was back, but what was he doing here at this time?

Surprise mirroring his own spread over Victor’s face as he realised the lights where on and the rink already in use. However, the expression melted quickly away into a distant smile. He waved and, for the remainder of the night, didn’t pay Georgi much attention as he practiced step sequences at the other end of the rink. He returned the next evening.

At first, it annoyed Georgi that he could not practice with as much wild abandon as before, but their familiarity soon had them fall into a rhythm and after a week, he barely noticed Victor at all. He was used to not having the rink to himself, after all, and they had shared the ice for twenty years and knew each others’ habits. They moved around each other with thoughtless ease, giving space when needed and taking it when offered, wordless, simply reading the movements of the other, each enveloped in their own thoughts.

Georgi had thought that Victor would only drop by a couple of times, maybe because he needed room to work on a new choreography. However, night after night passed without him doing anything but technical practice before he suddenly started running programs that Georgi remembered from years past. One evening, he seemed highly focused on perfecting the rough edges of _The Lilac Fairy_ , a choreography that he had last performed before a panel of judges over a decade ago. He was still going when Georgi left half past midnight.

He couldn’t deny he was curious, but by this point, odd practice routines were not a novelty for Victor. Georgi wasn’t sure if anyone had noticed, aside maybe from eagle-eyed Yakov – he hadn’t at first, either, because the changes had crept in one by one. Around last year’s off-season, Victor had begun spending more time at the rink than he had before, which didn’t strike Georgi as odd initially. He had had to push himself harder for a couple of years now and even Victor’s genius would not keep him ahead of the pack of hungry juniors forever. Everyone knew that Yuri Plisetsky, for example, had been hoping for a chance to take the fight to Victor the second he entered the seniors division in the upcoming season.

However, Georgi thought that the spirit Victor usually brought to his performance had drained away as his hours increased. It sometimes resurfaced, but only when he was running choreographies other than his current programs, which he did even directly before competitions when everyone else was trying to perfect their routines. Of course, his programs still looked polished, but he only ever seemed to bother with a veneer of emotion before the judges. In practice sessions, he was distracted, stone-faced, and only remembered to smile when someone looked at him. Now, as they weaved their steps around each other in the night, Georgi didn’t even see the spark with the old programs anymore. It was all gone.

Georgi didn’t know what was going on, but he also knew Victor too well to buy that it was nothing. They had never been fast friends, but they had known each other for a long while, and these many years of acquaintance had allowed him a few glimpses behind the curtain.

-

Spending so much time alone with Victor, memories came back to Georgi sometimes as he walked home in the cold and dark, feet wet as the St. Petersburg gutters failed to contend with the torrents of rain and dampness made its way through his shoes and socks.

He remembered the day when Victor decided to come to an ice show with a stomach flu and Georgi held his then-long hair as Victor threw up in the bushes behind the rink after his routine. When Victor had hurt his foot jumping in practice right after his first gold at Worlds at eighteen, Georgi had been the one to drive him to the hospital. He had sat for hours in the ER telling Victor dozens of times that everything would be fine even as they had both stared at Victor’s reddish-blue swollen ankle with growing trepidation (it did indeed turn out to be just sprained).

Georgi’s family had always seen figure skating as a good way to get him out of the house precisely so they did not have to bother with him, and Victor’s parents only came to the important and certified events, looking much like judges themselves when they did. This meant that while the other young skaters ran to their mothers and fathers, the two of them hung out alone after the pre-Junior competitions and exhibitions, escaping Yakov to drift through a hundred foreign ice halls and rinks, climbing trees and fences in the parking lots, finding metal Staff-Only doors leading to hallways of empty offices and dark basements with dead animals and the smell of mould in them.

There was also a vivid memory of that time Georgi had tried a Lutz when he was eight and knocked out both of his front baby teeth. The other children had been shrieking as blood covered the ice. Some might have run to get a coach, but only Victor had come over and dragged Georgi onto his shaking knees, pulling him away by his wrist. He had sat by his side at the entrance of the rink as Georgi sobbed and drooled blood while Victor awkwardly patted his head, looking shell-shocked. The image of their bloodstained skates and the criss-cross pattern their blades had left in the pink puddle on the ice remained burned into Georgi’s brain.

So there was a lot of history, but Georgi still thought it wasn’t his place to ask Victor. Just because Georgi was using the night to run himself into the ground practicing because he couldn’t stand himself when his thoughts had time to form didn’t mean Victor had a similar reason to be around. It could be harmless.

-

It was a week and a half into their late-night meetings when Victor said more than ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ for the first time.

“Sorry, I grabbed your water, Zhora.”

Georgi looked up from where he was tightening the laces on his skates and saw Victor waving the black bottle, licking a drop from his lips.

“It’s fine,” he said, straightening to lean against the rink.

“With the faces you’ve been making lately, I half expected there to be vodka in it,” Victor murmured as he placed the bottle back on the bench, further away from his own this time to avoid another mix-up.

Georgi tried not to scowl. “Very funny.”

Walking through the entrance in the protector wall, Victor halted next to him on the ice.

“Isn’t that the locket with Anya’s picture? Why do you still wear it?”

Everyone knew of the picture inside his pendant, since Mila had seen it fit to spread the information around once she had found out, but to be fair, it hadn’t bothered Georgi much then. No one should be embarrassed to express the love they felt for the person they were with! Things were a bit different now, of course, but he didn’t know why Victor would care. Looking at him, he was wearing that pretty, small smile he would show when he had a microphone under his nose, the kind he could summon easily and which thus didn’t really say anything. Georgi couldn’t tell if he was trying to pick a fight, but anger simmered in the pit of his stomach regardless.

“Because I want to,” he said. “Is that a problem?”

“It just seems a bit pathetic,” Victor answered with a shrug.

The small minority of people who Victor spoke openly to sometimes thought he was tactless. That wasn’t really right, in Georgi’s opinion. Victor knew perfectly well how he _should_ behave, otherwise he would have slipped up in front of the press or his fans every once in a while, but he never did. Consequently, if he was being ass, it was on purpose. Perhaps it was a sign of trust, but the brutal truth method had never worked on Georgi either way. It always felt a bit like catching a fist to the teeth and he was already hurting, his body, his heart, now his pride.

“I don’t care! I still love her,” Georgi answered.

“She broke up with you for another man,” Victor reminded him. “I don’t think she’s coming back.”

Victor seemed kind of scientifically interested in the whole matter, the way he narrowed his eyes at Georgi like he was an interesting specimen, and Georgi had no idea how to react to that.

“I know. So? What does that have to do with my feelings?” Georgi asked, testily.

“If someone hurt me like that, I don’t think I’d like them a lot anymore.” Victor ran a hand through his short, silver hair and shook his head. “I can’t decide if it sounds great or terrible to be that deep in love,” he added, absent-mindedly.

Georgi took a deep breath and suppressed the urge to ask Victor if he could have that internal debate without insulting him first next time.

“It’s both,” he said quietly, “but it’s not like I choose to be in love like that, anyway.”

Victor smiled that small smile again. They both stood in silence. Since Victor had found it appropriate to stab right to the matter of Georgi’s most private concerns, he decided that he deserved to satisfy his own curiosity as well.

“You know why I’m here. What about you?” he asked.

Once more, Victor pulled at a few strands of his hair before throwing his head back, staring at the beams of the high ceiling.

“Where else would I be?” he asked, sounding bitter.


	2. Chapter 2

“Zhora, how busy are you going to be this weekend?”

Georgi stopped in his turn as he heard Victor’s voice, letting the movement flow out into a lax curve which ended by Victor’s side.

“Mila and me are helping Mariya’s minis with an ice show,” Georgi said.

Victor nodded his head. Mariya Kuznetsov’s minis group was the unofficial seedbed for potential candidates for Yakov’s roster. Kids who got into her training group were coached by Yakov at least once a week and, as all parents knew very well, he scanned them for talent when he did so. A couple of kids currently looking to start in the junior division who Yakov was coaching had taken their very first wobbly steps on the ice under Mariya’s supervision.

“What are they doing this time?” Victor asked.

“ _Peter and the Wolf_ and the _Dance of the Knights_ by Prokofiev,” Georgi answered.

Two times a year, the minis would be taught a little team performance, mostly for the amusement of their families and friends, and Yakov liked to put a couple of his older skaters into the show so the parents could visualise where their children might end up at. It was a good way to keep them coming back to pay for their children’s expensive hobby, Victor was sure, and you had to motivate them to do that to have the talented kids on the ice long enough until they were eligible for any sort of state funding.

“Mariya would love it if you did a minis show sometime,” Georgi said.

“She has Mila and you,” Victor answered.

Georgi gave him a brief look, possibly too proud to say what they both knew: the parents were certainly impressed by their presence, but if Victor Nikiforov had skated with their kids, they as well as their sprogs would have been over the moon. Mariya would have replaced both Georgi and Mila with Victor in a heartbeat if he’d have agreed to come.

“The kids would get bored with me once they got to know me,” Victor argued.

Not to mention himself. Watching young skaters was cute for a while, but Victor usually felt like he was wasting his and their time standing among a gaggle of first graders whom he didn’t really know to help or teach or even have fun with. The basics they had to learn had come as naturally as walking to him at their age, so he couldn’t explain them well, and basically living at the rink, he had never had a chance to collect much experience with little children, so he didn’t know how to talk to them, either. Maybe he would even be jealous, Victor thought with a twitch of a sardonic smile, of the effortless enthusiasm and creativity that children brought to the ice when Victor himself was clinging tightly to the last shreds of his own inspiration.

“You’re much better with them. They see you get into their programs,” Victor added, which was actually true. Victor had watched Georgi training with the kids a few times when he happened to be at the rink, equally bemused and impressed when Georgi talked some six-year-old gravely through the story she might think of to put some soul into her rendition of _Two Merry Geese_ and didn’t tire of showing them how to bunny hop for the dozenth time if he thought the move enriched their performance.

“If they’re supposed to grow into artists, you have to take them serious from the start,” Georgi said with a stern face.

Victor huffed a quiet laugh.

“But you’re not going to be busy with that all weekend, right? Because I have a photoshoot and an interview in Moscow and I need someone to watch Makkachin.”

“That’s fine,” Georgi said with a shrug.

“I’ll bring some food for him on Friday when I drop him off.”

“No, I still have enough.”

Victor halted.

“Oh... okay.”

That made sense. After all, Victor took it for granted that Georgi wouldn’t mind watching his dog unless he was out of town, too, because he had done it for years and years. Sometimes it felt that in the off-seasons or between the big competitions, Georgi saw more of Makkachin than Victor did. Though Georgi had his own sponsors and contracts, Victor beat everyone else at the rink by leagues and miles as far as demand for him at off-the-ice engagements went. Still, the fact that someone else spent so much time with his pet they were keeping food for when he was inevitably going to be dumped with them again underlined many things Victor had been trying not to think about recently.

-

As the taxi crawled through Moscow traffic, Victor glanced at himself in the rear-view mirror to make sure the shadows under his eyes were not too deep for a make-up artists to contend with. He had spent a night restlessly moving from the bed to the couch back to the bed, reading odd pages of several books without taking any of it in and finally succumbing to some black-and-white movie on TV that washed through his brain without leaving a trace. All the while, he tried to pull from his swirling mind the reasons for the massive inner resistance against the bog-standard photoshoot and press run he was doing today.

These things were rote, which was why they shouldn’t be a problem, but at least Victor could go on autopilot and keep up a smile as he played clothes-rack for a dozen tight-fitted button-up shirts and dress pants. His human interaction was downgraded to that same frozen camera smile as he nodded his way through conversations he didn’t actually listen to, but his compliance and approval seemed to be all the photographer and crew really wanted out of him, anyway. He took two aspirin in the bathroom to get his headache under control and once more checked in the mirror that everything was still in place. After the stylists had gotten to him, he looked clean and awake, no less handsome than usual, and yet there was a lingering feeling of distant unease, like he had forgotten his keys at home but was not yet fully aware of it, only noting the missing weight in his pocket; but he couldn’t figure out the source.

Victor signed autographs for some of the staff on his way out of the building and walked down the street to Café Pushkin. It was a cold day for April and he could still see patches of snow on car roofs and piled against the curb. He had meant to go skating on a lake this winter, but between the competitions, practice and the media, he hadn’t managed to do it, after all, and now it was probably too late. He remembered that the same thing had happened to him last year, too. Makkachin would have loved it, too – maybe not so much the lake, but surely the meadows or forest that might surround it. He never got him out of St. Petersburg these days.

Victor had chosen Café Pushkin as the interview spot mainly because it was close to the studio, but also because he had always liked their style: high windows, dark, wooden shelves worked into the columns and stacked with a whole library worth of books, old-fashioned brass lanterns hanging from wooden garlands, and odd artefacts of some 19th century sitting room, like a globe and a harp, interspersed with the tables. He gave his name to a waitress and trailed after her further inside, the smell of coffee and sweet cake wafting around him.

A young woman was sitting at a table in the back. She hadn’t ordered anything to drink yet – very courteous, Victor heard his mother’s voice saying in the back of his head. He had never quite understood the custom on more than an intellectual level. He really wouldn’t have minded if she’d had a coffee while he let her wait for half an hour, since that was also impolite, but good manners dictated it had to be so. Perhaps it was how one proved they were more well-bred than the other person committing their own faux-pas, but that was also just his mother’s tiresome suspiciousness baked into his own thoughts. The reporter probably just wanted to be nice.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said, smiling as he sat down and shook her hand over the table. “We ran a bit behind schedule.”

“That’s absolutely fine. Nice to meet you.”

She smiled as she fiddled with the small camera propped up on a stand next to her. The waitress came to take their orders and Victor wondered if the extra caffeine in an espresso was a good idea after all the coffee he had had this morning but ordered it anyway.

“We’re doing it guerrilla style today,” the woman joked as she righted her equipment.

Victor smiled along. He had done interviews looking into every kind of camera under the sun, including smartphones and big, movie-quality ones for a couple of documentaries. When he had first started doing interviews, of course, smartphones hadn’t even been around yet. God, that felt like a century ago.

The reporter offered to wait before their drinks arrived so it wouldn’t interrupt their conversation, to which Victor agreed. As he half-heartedly engaged in a floundering, awkward attempt at small talk, he realised he hadn’t asked her for a name, but also couldn’t remember if she had told him and he had been spacing out or if he should be remembering it from their e-mail exchange. He didn’t ask.

The waitress placed their cups on the table and the reporter looked faintly grateful before turning her attention back on Victor and pressing the red button on her camera.

“Mr. Nikiforov, it’s very nice to meet you today.”

“You already said that,” Victor answered.

He had no idea what possessed him to do so. The idea of pretending the conversation began at the moment the camera switched on to draw in the viewers was nothing new to him nor should it have bothered him, being the harmless broadcasting trick that it was. There had just been this sudden wave of exhaustion with the artificial conversations he had been holding for so many years.

The woman looked a little worried at the other side of the table, probably thinking he was trying to be difficult, which wasn’t his intention. He gave his most brilliant smile to off-set the comment, playing it off as a joke.

“Oh, well, yes. True. So, Mr. Nikiforov, how are you liking Moscow?”

The interview progressed more smoothly now, like many before it. Moscow was pretty this time of year. Yes, a bit warmer that St. Petersburg, no, not by much. Yes, he used to live here as a small child. Any stories? Victor thought of that one time he had fought with his father about getting dirt on his dress pants when he had been about four years old and had run into traffic trying to escape him. He could still hear the screech of tires skidding on concrete in his ears. He told another story instead, something about his first memory of snow on his birthday, which he could recite word for word by this point.

The next item on the checklist were his gold medals. Congratulations were followed by an expository dialogue for the viewers about his programs. Victor could feel his attention drifting. He looked at the leather-bound books standing in neat rows. He wondered if any of them actually had pages in them or if they were just a façade, like the hollow volumes that you could store alcohol in.

“… Mr. Nikiforov?”

Victor sat up straight.

“Yes, sorry? You were saying?”

“What made you gravitate towards the songs you chose? _Stammi Vicino_ , for example – that is a very hopeful song.”

Victor paused.

“You could say that,” he said slowly.

“But you wouldn’t?” the reporter noted.

Victor opened his mouth and closed it. He had been about to point out the lines about cutting throats and freezing writing hands, but realised just in time that there was no way he would not end up coming off as negative at best and deranged at worst. The whole thing sounded like two people on a mad escape to him; there was more pain there than romance, certainly in the first stanzas, at least. He found himself thinking about Georgi and his pendant and thought that he would have understood the bitter notes of the song for sure. However, when he looked at the reporter’s face and then the camera, he realised that wasn’t what anyone wanted to hear from him.

“No, you are right,” he said. “There is a very intense feeling in that song. Very deeply passionate. I hope I conveyed that with my free skate.”

The reporter smiled and they could go on to a discussion of his quads and some comments about plans for the next season, of which Victor had none so far, but with his penchant for surprising the audience, vagueness was simply an expected feature of his.

When the camera was packed up, Victor finished his espresso with one gulp and excused himself with another appointment that didn’t exist so he didn’t have to stay around to chat. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so tired after what was a very normal amount of work for him and he didn’t think it was the lack of sleep, either. Maybe he was just getting old, but he doubted that his energy and motivation to engage should have been leaking out of him like water from a broken pot before he had even reached thirty.

Once outside, he slid on his sunglasses to ensure his anonymity even as the clouds gathered overhead and called a taxi to get to the airport, four hours before his flight was set to go.

-

Sunday morning, Victor made his way to the Sports Champions Club in his sleek silver Toyota Camry and found Georgi sitting on a bench in front of the building, where they’d agreed to meet. When Makkachin spotted Victor coming up the road, he unfolded himself from where he was curled up with his head on Georgi’s black, scuffed loafers. When the dog tugged at the leash and his tail brushed his leg as it wagged hectically from side to side, Georgi looked up from the book on his knees, too. Victor smiled at them. The dog’s true joy to see him never failed to touch a part of his heart. He leaned down to ruffle the curly fur of Makkachin’s head.

“Hello there! Thanks for watching him, Zhora.”

With a small nod, Georgi unwound the leash from his hand and gave it to Victor, pushing his book into his gym bag. Victor sat down on the wooden bench next to him. It was just a short drive home with Makkachin, then he should probably come back and try to think of something he actually wanted to do for next season, put these songs he had commissioned a while ago to some use.

Judging by the bag, Georgi had been waiting for him to come by to hand over Makkachin so he could go on to the rink, too, but instead he sat leaning against the wall of the sports palace for a moment, looking out over the street as he pulled at the sleeve of his fitted black coat.

“Are you alright?”

Victor looked up from Makkachin’s adoring face and at Georgi instead, who was eyeing him carefully.

“Why do you ask?”

Georgi shrugged, face blank, but Victor could see something was bothering him even though he tried to play it cool.

“Mila showed us the interview,” he said. “You seemed a bit – off.”

“Was it that bad?” Victor asked, forcing a laugh.

Had it been that bad? The thought made him feel cold.

“Probably not.” At Victor’s doubting glance, Georgi shrugged. “Most viewers don’t skate with you at midnight.”

Victor shook off the undue surprise. It was strange to contemplate, but aside from Yakov, Georgi was possible the closest acquaintance Victor had, so he really shouldn’t wonder that he picked up on a few things others wouldn’t think of. There was Chris, of course, and a few other skaters Victor was friendly with, but work demanded that they met mostly at competitions. And how many he had skated alongside had already fallen by the wayside claimed by age and injury and had faded from Victor’s field of attention through that because his focus was always on the ice? He was the oldest competing skater at the top level at the moment, beating Georgi by a day. There weren’t many left who had known him for longer than a few years.

Unease crept up the length of his spine like cold fingers. What else had Georgi seen and not mentioned? Georgi was by and large a quiet person and Victor had not considered that Georgi paid much attention to him. Either way, he had no answer for Georgi or even himself, especially not one he wanted to put in words.

“Makkachin is going to die soon,” Victor said because it seemed like the one concrete thing to pin the haze of grey around his mind on.

Evening-blue eyes growing wide, Georgi looked down at the dog.

“Is he sick?”

“No, just old. So I know it’ll come eventually.”

“He’s spry for his age. I almost lost him at the park yesterday when he chased a dove. He will hold on for a while.”

Victor glanced at Georgi from the corner of his eyes. It sounded like he took Victor serious. Of course he would. If any grown man would commiserate with Victor over the entirely unsurprising fate of an ancient dog, it was Georgi, who just seemed to have a heart that was a bit too big for reason. Slightly ridiculous, but Victor felt a brief pang of affection as he watched him bend down to scratch Makkachin behind the ears. He doubted Georgi believed him that it was the whole reason for his behaviour, though. He himself knew it was wrong. It was just one of the changes that Victor was failing to deal with.

Victor got up and motioned at Makkachin to do the same, Georgi looking up at him.

“See you tonight,” Victor told him.


	3. Chapter 3

“If you lean any further into the Salchow before you take off, you’ll start burrowing into the ice head-first, Zhora.”

Georgi turned sharply on the edge of his blade, Victor’s words tearing him violently from the torrent of his thoughts. The first fresh green leaves on the boughs outside his apartment had reminded him that this time last year, he had been sitting in a café drinking black tea with Anya – it was a shared favourite, and they both liked it best with blackcurrant jam, which had seemed like one of these little signs of the universe back then. As they had talked, they had enjoyed the bright beams of what still felt like a cold winter sun, birds singing in the shrubbery around. Who could have known he’d be back to being alone only a year later?

Here in the present, he wasn’t sitting on a wrought-iron chair, tea forgotten in his hand as he admired one of the most charming women he had ever met; he was in sweat-soaked clothes at the rink, out of breath from skating against the memories, and Victor was leaning against the protector wall as he watched him.

“It’s no wonder you keep falling the way you’ve been skating since the off-season started,” Victor continued. “You’ll break something eventually.”

“Are you my coach now?” Georgi asked, sullen, turning away from Victor to glide over to the entrance of the ice field to grab his water bottle, which he’d placed the on the floor. Of course his performance was off; how could it not be with everything going on in his mind?

“You seem to need another one.”

Georgi took a sip to stop himself from arguing with Victor. This wasn’t about technique, but he _was_ giving in to the temptation to use skating the way one might a punching bag, turning the sport into a mere instrument to take his frustrations out on. Was that really how he wanted to treat his favourite form of expression? Besides, it wasn’t a good idea to breed bad habits and he’d been performing pretty rough for a few weeks now, even during regular training sessions whenever Yakov wasn’t looking too closely. Should he let Anya take his other love, the one he had for his art, too? That was a lot of power to give to a woman who had cast him aside like yesterday’s newspaper, even if his heart still beat for her.

He swallowed his pride with the mouthful of water and turned around. Yakov always said that the best skaters were those who used the resources available to them.

“Alright, coach me. But I get to say something about what you’ve been doing here in the evenings, too.”

It would not be the first time that they had rated each other’s performance. When your coach was not available, few other people were as capable of helping to iron out the rough edges than those skating at your level. However, the advice came more often from Victor than it came from Georgi; if Victor made mistakes, he was usually already aware of them and working on solutions. So perhaps Georgi was just a little pleased when his comment elicited a look of surprise from Victor, followed by a thin smile.

“That sounds fair,” he said. “Let’s see it then.” He put his forefinger to his lower lip. “A step sequence – any you like –, then quadruple Salchow, triple toe. Properly this time.”

From the amused tone of his voice, Georgi could tell Victor had fun playing the maestro and would most certainly enjoy pulling him apart for his performance, too. The spark of defiant will to prove himself was more motivation than he’d felt since the day Anya had walked out the door. Georgi held on to it.

He moved to the centre of the ice and breathed in and out, closed his eyes, focused. Since it was near midnight and his mind was sluggish with lack of sleep, Georgi did not try to think of a step sequence of the top of his head, but simply reverted to one he had used for the middle part of Mikhail Glinka’s _Kamarinskaya_ , which he’d run six years ago for his short program. The song had always made the performance easy to slide into like an old pair of shoes, well-known from childhood, when he had first seen people dance to it at a festival in his grandfather’s home village.

He followed the old steps etched into his memory, mindful of his posture, the line of his back and bend of his knees, while looking vaguely up, as if he was still a young boy staring at the dancing pairs that floated over a trampled field of grass to the tune of an orchestra crackling on an old cassette player. He fell into the three turn and then swung his free leg forward and around, launching himself off the ice as he held on to the image of twirling dresses and feet that sprang as if weightless. He hadn’t started strong enough - the quad turned into a triple –, but he managed to lift off into the toe loop right away and land it without wavering.

“Again,” Victor said with a dismissive wave of his hand and an aloof smile.

Against the part of him determined to stay buried in the bittersweet memories of Anya for a little longer, Victor’s haughty gaze made the corner of his mouth twitch. God, he was a bastard sometimes. Georgi would show him.

Georgi repeated the whole sequence, landing the quadruple Salchow this time but staggering briefly before he managed to launch into the triple toe loop. Victor moved his hand again, just a slack, lazy flick of his wrist, grinning. Georgi suppressed the urge to flip him off and started over as ordered.

“Keep your leg and arm straighter before you pull up into the turn,” Victor said from the side-lines, surprising Georgi with an actual assessment when he had landed his third toe loop. “Watch that your neck stays straight. You could do a more beautiful curve out of the landing of the triple toe, too.”

After his fifth attempt, Georgi came to a flowing T-stop after the toe loop and didn’t hear a comment or see Victor’s long fingers directing him to repeat like he was a dog at a practice course. Instead, Victor clapped his hands once.

“Finally. I think you get too distracted with the ideas in your head sometimes. You have good technique when you’re focused.”

“Imagining something is part of the focus for me,” Georgi said, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. Loose strands of short dark hair were hanging into his eyes. “Maybe I have to remember to marry the two,” he admitted, after a moment.

He hadn’t done that much lately. Thoughts of Anya had fuelled some sort of cathartic movement, but not anything as coherent as a performance. It had basically been all emotion, no thought spared to polish, which wasn’t the way to do it. Georgi had long understood that he would not catch up to Victor, but he still wanted to be good. Part of telling a story to an audience instead of just yourself was technical mastery, after all. The most amazing song sounded pitiful wrangled through broken instruments and smudged text made poems harder to enjoy, too. Victor was right.

“You promised me a critique, too,” Victor said, circling him slowly on the ice like a shark sensing blood in the water. “What should I skate?”

Georgi looked Victor up and down once.

“You don’t have to do anything,” Georgi said. “It’s more of an impression of what I’ve seen – the old programs you’ve been running.”

“Alright, let’s hear it.”

Georgi crossed his arms over his chest.

“You’re just going through the motions. It feels more like watching a sequence practice. A good one, but nothing more than that.”

Something in Victor’s face grew tight.

“Well, I was never as much of an actor as you can be…”

“But you are a really good skater and that is part of it. You used to project emotion!” Georgi argued, emphatically. “What you do is still impressive, but it’s – sport, not art. Your technique is so good I wager you can fool a lot of people into thinking this is your best, but I’ve watched you before.” Georgi lowered his head slightly and caught his eyes. “I know what these choreographies used to look like and it wasn’t that.” A pause. “I wouldn’t have lost to that.”

Victor snorted, his eyes narrowing, something hard glinting in them for a moment. “Oh, is that so?”

For a moment, Georgi and Victor stood staring straight at each other, only a foot of ice separating them. Then, Victor’s shoulders sank and he gave a laugh, pearling, clear, and artificial in a way that was startingly obvious.

“You know... I forgot what I liked about these choreographies. When I skate, my mind is blank. I can’t think of anything,” he said quietly, glancing at the ceiling. He pulled himself together quickly, though, raising a brow as he brushed his hair back. “Perhaps we should do a pair skate together. You’ve got a head full of thoughts and I have none. It sounds like our issues should cancel each other out.”

Georgi hadn’t expected an answer this frank. It was rare to hear Victor speak about feelings that mattered. The late hour and long practice sessions of the last weeks seemed to be weighing on him, too, crushing down a few walls that might have stayed firmly in place otherwise. As Georgi looked at his airily amused smile, he saw they had been reinforced once more, though.

“You are two centimetres taller than me, so you have to do the lifting,” Georgi answered.

Victor chuckled.

-

“You know, I _would_ like to choreograph something for two people at some point.”

Georgi pulled his shirt over his head before he turned to look at Victor sitting hunched over at the other side of the changing room, pushing his skate guards on.

“Excuse me?” he asked, feeling like he had missed the first part of a conversation.

“Remember what I told you last night?” Victor prompted. “I’ve never choreographed a performance for two before. It’s still some time before we have to finalise our programs for next season. Why don’t we actually do it?”

Georgi wondered if this was a joke or if he had fallen prey to Victor’s habit of working bizarre surprises into every part of his life.

“Neither of us is nearly light enough to work as the woman in a pair skate,” Georgi reminded him.

Which was to say nothing of the fact that the last time either of them had seriously practiced lifting figures was when they had been in Juniors and even then it had been more of a diversion, since it was clear they were heading for singles by that point.

“An ice dance, then, with just a few lifts,” Victor said, shrugging his shoulders. “What could it hurt? We aren’t doing anything productive in the evenings. We could at least do something new!”

Georgi hesitated, pretending to concentrate on folding up his shirt. He’d already spent so much of his career being compared to Victor when they got on the ice one after another, he really didn’t feel like being examined side-by-side. You could fill a library with the amount of think-pieces reporters had written in which Georgi ended up as the serviceable average against which brilliant Victor was described to shine so brightly, poisoned with damning praise and sweeping judgements of Georgi’s skills. He was pretty sure producing an article like that was an induction ritual for young Russian sports journalists by this point.

But in all likelihood, no one but a few rink mates would ever see them run this thing, anyway, if that. At the very least it would give him a project to focus on other than spinning in circles thinking about the break-up. 

“It could be interesting,” he said slowly. “I’ve never done one of your choreographies before.”

“I want to see what you make of it,” Victor cocked his head, “and if you can keep up.”

Georgi was worried about that, too, but even without seeing that toothy smile from Victor, he wouldn’t have admitted to it.

“Count on it.”


	4. Chapter 4

What song could Georgi dance to?

Victor found himself sitting at his laptop with Spotify open in one window and YouTube in another. Usually, he would have asked what song he himself wanted to use, since he considered himself the best decision maker in everything to do with skating at his rink. However, since his well of inspiration had run dry, perhaps he could find some in Georgi’s strengths and tailor a program that would make him look amazing. Victor knew he himself was versatile enough to do a good show to just about any music, so he didn’t have to worry about keeping up. Besides, if he tried picking outside his comfort zone because he had another man’s talents on his mind, wouldn’t that give him a chance to surprise himself for a change?

Idly, Victor typed Georgi’s name in the YouTube search bar and scrolled through the list of old skates cut up out of some competition broadcast or another over the years, clicking on whatever caught his eye. Much like most people in Yakov’s stable, Georgi had started off with the classical Russian and Italian and German warhorses, but while he had never lost his love for that sort of music, he had ventured out into several directions once he’d proven himself, most of them either experimental or sentimental.

His strength was interpretation, of course; he had the mindset of an artist first and an athlete second. It was why tongue-in-cheek performances had never worked for Georgi. He could bring joyous and playful if he wanted, but the flippant and ironic did not match his all-in style of performance and left him looking uncomfortable. He’d never be one of these people who could pull off a crowd pleaser comedy exhibition skate. The truth of his emotions being on display was necessary for him to build any connection with other people. Despite the fact that he’d lagged behind Victor in medals all his life, it didn’t surprise Victor that he still had passionate fans and followers who appreciated his expressive dances and outrageous costumes, his complete dedication to grasp on to a role, fill it with himself and lay out whatever he felt on the ice for all to see.

Though he hadn’t taken Georgi serious as a competitor in years now, Victor had always found that way of presenting himself fascinating, disquieting but intriguing. Maybe it was because he had known for a long time that for all his talents, this was something he could not imitate. Victor showed emotions, he felt – used to feel – intensely when he skated, but a veil of acting remained. Anyone who had come away from his skates thinking they’d understood a deeper part of him had been looking at a mirror or a mask. Not that he imagined Georgi thought of the way he skated as an act of courage. It was more of an inevitability considering the person he was. Still, that was what it was to Victor, for he would have needed to be a braver man than he was to put himself out there like that.

What routine had Georgi been most successful with? One season, five years ago, Victor remembered, Georgi had actually taken the Nationals gold from him and pushed up right behind him at every other competition. It was a strong year in every respect, but his free skate had stood out. The memory came to Victor in a flash: _None but the lonely heart_ by Tchaikovsky. As much as he hated to admit it, Georgi had deserved the win. He’d died a death deserted in a blizzard every single time that he had skated it.

A dark, old, Russian romance – well, there were a ton of those out there and some had to be suited to ice dances, for sure. If Georgi had underlined the story of a man bemoaning his loneliness so beautifully, then perhaps there was a love song just as passionate and melancholic for him to throw himself into with Victor.

Over the years, Victor had collected a vast amount of music, enjoying both skating and choreographing as he did, sponging up songs left and right, lists of thousands that he’d at one point or another considered. After a few clicks through his personal system of tags, he was left with a handful to sort through. He immediately discarded Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky. They had both danced them too often and he didn’t want a repeat, he wanted something new born out of the kernel of this inspiration he’d had.

In a sub-folder of a sub-folder, Victor found his answer: a recording of Leonid Kharitonov singing the old song _Shine, Shine, My Star_ in his deep, ponderous voice. The passion as the chorus called on that star, the assurances that only this one light in the sky shone to them, the devotion, ‘eternally unwithering’, finding one’s whole life illuminated, and finally an ending plea for the star to continue shining on the singer’s grave if need be... If Georgi couldn’t make _this_ song work then he’d have to quit skating altogether.

The song ran on repeat as Victor pushed off the laptop and reached for a note pad. However, as he set the tip of his pen on paper, he was stuck again.

He had an idea of what he wanted Georgi to do. In the technical sense, his jumps were his best feature. He did not always land them clean, but he flew off the ice higher than most people Victor remembered skating alongside. If Victor would compose the perfect competition routine for him, he’d get him off the ice as much as his stamina and the scoring system allowed. The well-known pattern of a performance that would maximise points already stretched out before Victor in his mind. Even Victor’s exhibition skates had always been there to show off, to prove that even while having fun, he still handily outskated and outscored everyone else.

This wasn’t that, though. No technical panel would ever rate this, no audience watch it. It would be downright boring of Victor to still cling to these old moulds when there wasn’t even a reason. How did you write a skate that moved away from them, though? Where would you even start?

-

When Victor came in for his practice slot the next day, the amount of cars in the parking lot adjacent to the Sports Champions Club reminded him that Yakov had told him he’d moved his hours into the evening. Mariya Kuznetsov, whose excellent kids’ class Yakov sometimes coached and liked to pick promising novices from, were holding the exhibition for their families today.

Victor was ready to turn around and trudge back home, but hesitated. He had been restless there and he didn’t know what else but skating he wanted to do, even while he had no particular motivation to get his blades on the ice. Besides, it would be a chance to watch Georgi skate, inane as the occasion may be. Despite the fact that he knew him inside out as a skater, he still hadn’t been able to figure out anything interesting to do with him (or himself for that matter) in the planned ice dance.

He snuck in through a back entrance so he wouldn’t gather too much attention and walked up to the uppermost seats of the exhibition rink. A few people turned around, a hushed conversation buzzing between them, but Victor smiled and averted his eyes. Thankfully, the families were more focused on the kids, none older than eight, spilling out into the rink wearing white dresses and blue trousers and shirts, tittering and murmuring. Victor counted six girls and five boys. Yakov and Mariya stood by the side of the rink, whereas Mila and Georgi had taken up position on the other end of the ice, dressed in unassuming black leggings and pullovers, probably so as to not draw attention away from the children. The audience whispered excitedly. Cameras flashed as the children stumbled into place.

Prokofiev’s _Peter And The Wolf_ began playing, the bird a flute, the cat a clarinet, the grandfather a bassoon... distantly, Victor remembered it from his own childhood. It had been in the sparse catalogue of entertainment deemed suitable for him by his parents. He had never liked it much as a result. On the ice, the children were gliding and spinning, threading amongst each other in neat rows. As the music continued on, one or two children would come forward while the others performed synchronised steps in the background. Each of the kids features in the front line would be playing an animal or character as the instrument grew prominent in the melody, then retreat to make room for the next children to take the spotlight. It was as cute as it was mind-numbing.

In his boredom, Victor hadn’t noticed that Mila and Georgi had separated themselves from the side of the rink. The strings of _Peter And The Wolf_ subsided, and suddenly the heavy drums leading in Prokofiev’s _Dance of the Knights_ thrummed through the rink, as if summoned by the two pro skaters. They glanced briefly each other before they jumped, each landing a triple Lutz, and came down clean on the ice before continuing on their way. In the front, the children all scrambled to get into line again and put on their most stern faces.

This performance was deliberately skewed more mature, Victor could tell; there was no more bunny-hopping and waving and mimicking animal ears with crooked fingers. Georgi and Mila had moved into key positions at the front and back respectively, making themselves cheat sheets to look at as the kids copied their movements on the ice. Then, as the song grew to a close, with Georgi in the front and Mila bringing up the rear, the kids fanned out like a flock of birds across the rink. Mila moved through the open space created by the children and threw herself into a triple toe loop before she landed in front of Georgi and let him pick her up and spin them in an elegant curve. He set her down on the ice by the group of girls that had now congregated in the front and joined the boys at the back.

Mila followed him immediately, the girls in orderly pursuit. She lounged toward him like a tigress, grabbing Georgi around the waist, and shifted both their weight backwards before she lifted him a few inches off the ice for a low circle spin.

In front of him, Victor heard the audience erupt into laughter and he found he had to grin, too. As Georgi was released, the children paired up to take each other by the hands and spin. One girl was left over, a round-faced child of four or five years. Georgi and Mila grasped her arms and lifted her briefly between them before they released her to do a few confident steps forward and sink daintily to one knobbly knee. Behind her, Mila, Georgi and the other children imitated the pose.

Among thundering applause, the group dispersed. Victor watched two of the boys dangle off Georgi’s arms, making him pull them to the rink exit. Mila was showing a little girl how to do a scratch spin. Parents and grand-parents chatted as they got up, cameras were shut off and phones recording videos lowered.

Victor leaned back in his seat. The performance hadn’t been a proper ice dance or a figure skating choreography or a group skate or anything, not even something you’d show at a real exhibition. It had just been there and entertaining to watch for the small circle of people it was meant for. That was all it had had to be. Though the kids were aiming for competition spots eventually, the ice was not a place where they fought right now, but a one where they had fun.

That was the kind of choreography he’d never written before and what made it so difficult for him to think of the dance he wanted them to perform, Victor realised. He was not used to choreographing something that could be worthless in the eyes of maybe anyone but himself and his partner on the ice. In fact, he was almost scared of it.

For once, he’d really have to commit to wasting time.

-

“This is so beautiful.”

Georgi was smiling softly as the last notes of Kharitonov’s dark voice subsided. Victor grinned to himself. It paid to know the skaters you were choreographing for.

“When you said it was a love song, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it, but I’d really like to skate to this.”

“Because it’s with me?” Victor asked.

“No, because of… well.” Georgi tugged at the pendant around his neck. “But we could do a lot with this.”

That Georgi might still be too heartbroken to consider a love song was something Victor hadn’t even thought about. Obviously, he was still working through it, but it had been, what, two months now? Two months after the break-up of any of his short-lived relationships, Victor didn’t think he’d even properly remembered the faces of his own ex-boyfriends anymore. But of course, it was Georgi. This was in part why the song fit him so well.

“So did you choreograph an ice dance?” Georgi asked.

“A little. Not really.”

Georgi looked mildly interested.

“Not really?”

“It’s a combination. The jumps would belong in a pair or singles skate, but they don’t adhere to ISU points and we can’t do the proper pair skate lift or jumps, anyway. There are a few easy lifts. The footwork is more like an ice dance. I didn’t pay too much attention to compulsory figures at all.”

Suddenly, Victor felt apprehensive again about his unpolished, unscoreable product. He liked the way it looked in his head, but if Georgi didn’t want to put time into something with no use, then he had to scrap it and go back to the drawing board to produce a skate that wasn’t just a fanciful product of his fantasy.

“So it’s more of an interpretive dance. That sounds fine, it’s not like we’re running it next season,” Georgi said.

Victor smiled, a weight dropping off his shoulders.

“Here, this is the list of moves.”

He pushed a sheet of pencil notes into Georgi’s hands and let the CD skip back. The music started up again.

Victor held on to air as Georgi watched him move over the ice, grabbing his invisible partner to pull them close once and then let them go at the end of the first stanza, jumping a quadruple Salchow that would be mirrored by Georgi.

For the second stanza, after a brief dance together, Victor skirted around the edge of the rink while Georgi would do a death drop into a spin before moving out of the turn and almost directly into Victor’s arms once more. Victor would touch him on the shoulder briefly before pulling away, Georgi following, as Victor chained a triple Lutz and a triple Axel while Kharitonov sighed of the star of hope in his longing soul. They would come together at the end for the highest direct lift Victor could pull off.

The final stanza had them do mirroring triple Lutzes as close to each other as they could pull off without colliding. Then they would be holding on to each other through a footwork section and spin in a slow circle like a dance, arm in arm, until they parted quickly and suddenly on ‘and if I die, over my grave’ where Georgi would sink on one knee for the last line while Victor leaned over him for the following words: ‘shine, shine on, my star’.

Georgi had been alternating between glancing at the sheet and at Victor. As the music stopped, he tapped the paper.

“It looks good. You have a lot of easy single and double jumps for me, though. Don’t you think I can do something more challenging?”

He sounded slightly insulted.

“I’m making you jump a quadruple Salchow right at the start,” Victor reminded him. “I just want you not to be on the ice whenever you’re not with me. You are lost, unmoored.” He raised a brow. “If you jump twenty triple toe loops, you’ll actually be dead by the end of the skate. I think you’ll be pretty done for even with this.”

“We’ll see about that,” Georgi said stubbornly.

-

For a couple of evenings, they danced the parts on their own, next to each other. Victor watched Georgi and corrected him to fit his vision while quietly impressed with how _into it_ he already looked even though there wasn’t a partner to play off of. The looks that man could give a spot of empty space could break anyone’s heart.

On the third evening, Georgi caught up to Victor doing his warm-up at the left-hand side of the rink.

“Let’s skate together tonight,” he said. “This is the kind of choreography we have to develop as a pair. It makes no sense alone.”

Victor smiled briefly as he straightened his shirt.

“You’re right. Though you look rather immersed without me. Any tips what I should think of, since you say I’m only going through the motions right now?”

Georgi regarded him thoughtfully.

“I think there’s two ways to go about it. Either you think about someone you used to love and try to go back to that mindset, or you imagine someone you would like to love. A perfect image, so to say.”

Victor blew a few strands of hair out of his face.

“That’s pretty abstract.” In fact, Victor doubted he could keep that narrative running while trying to connect with the music, the performance, and not completely blundering his way through the choreography. He’d always honed in more on a feeling rather than a complete story. “What if I just think of you as the person I love? You’re right there in my arms.”

“Well, that works… too, of course,” Georgi managed, looking just a little flustered. “If it doesn’t bother you. It’s more difficult for some people to pretend to love someone specifically.”

“So can you project anything on me? You haven’t even had a boyfriend before,” Victor teased. Not that he knew of, anyway – but when Georgi had a lover, it was actually impossible to share a rink with him and not know. He had spent six months or so in his teenage years on a starry-eyed crush on a hockey player that never amounted to anything, though, so Victor knew the whole idea wasn’t completely alien to him.

“I’ve imagined a lot more unrealistic things while skating than that I might be in love with you,” Georgi said, confidently, realising a beat too late his sentence functioned more as a compliment than a brag about his active imagination. His cheeks pink. “I mean…”

Victor had to laugh.

“Well then... one more thing,” he said, raising his index finger. “You have to take off your locket while we skate. I know it’s not my picture in there.”

“That makes sense,” Georgi admitted after a moment’s hesitation.

That was his good deed done for the day, Victor decided, as he watched the necklace join Georgi’s water bottle on the bench. Maybe this whole Anya chapter could reach its last page a little faster with his encouragement. Besides, some small part of him really didn’t like the idea of Georgi wearing the locket for the skate, concerns about the thing knocking him in the teeth in a lift aside. He wanted to lose himself in the fantasy the way Georgi always did, even if just for a few minutes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want to listen to their song, click [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8dTbpygqLo) for the YouTube video.


End file.
